The battle inside the Ashen Bottleneck had ceased to be a contest between two armies. It had become an unstoppable network avalanche.
What had begun as a razor-sharp override of twelve hundred and fifty orphaned corpses had now triggered an exponential chain reaction. The hijacked vanguard smashed deeper into the canyon. Then, trampling frontline handlers and crushing support units, more and more Ghost Sect deacons were removed.
And with every deacon who died, his entire file of walking corpses decoupled from the sect’s control lines and fell straight into Lin Tao’s open broadcast loop.
Two thousand eight hundred.
Three thousand two hundred.
Four thousand.
Within fifteen minutes of the first inversion, over four-fifths of the invading army had been claimed by the Precursor Relic atop the Old Imperial Signal Bluff. The leftover twelve hundred corpses—still desperately manipulated by the five scared elders on their bone palanquins—were fully surrounded by their former comrades.
The canyon was an ocean of churning black iron and flashing glaives.
